We have many people asking for more gun control, others like me saying that there is no justification, and a generally declining murder rate. If gun control was a necessity, wouldn't the homicide rate increase as the number of guns increased? This is not the case. While a causative link between higher gun ownership and declining murder trends cannot be proven, there is correlation between trained gun owners and the decreasing murder rate since 1992. I set out to look at the data again. Has there been a higher arrest rate for homicides over the same time period? Have we put more police on the street during the same period? The answer is no to both questions. Stumped, I began to search the literature for any data-driven analysis that would explain the results. The apparent answer is surprising.
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| Data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Database |
In looking over the data, I had only been looking from 1990 or thereabouts until the present. The reason for this was twofold. First, the data before 1995 is more sparse. Second, I was focused on a causative link between the advent of right-to-carry legislation and the murder rate. That phenomenon began in 1989 with Florida's landmark legislation and continues to today. While looking for another causative link, I started looking at the murder rate from 1960 to the present. What a shock. The murder rate in 2011 is actually somewhat higher than the rate in 1960! What could explain this? Could there be an under-reporting of crime in the period between 1960 and 1980? No, that does not seem to be the case. Most of the discussion out there seems to be qualitative with everything from civilization trends, the Vietnam war, to whose politics were responsible. None of these arguments were associated with data. Considering that gun control began in earnest after the Kennedy assassination in 1963, the trends do not favor gun control in any way. One of the more qualitative analyses (A blog post actually) had a comment about lead levels and crime rates. When I researched this, I came across some papers by Rick Nevin. Mr. Nevin is an economist with degrees from Boston College and an MBA from northwestern. He has published several papers that appear to show a causative link between blood lead levels and all sorts of violent crime. My favorite is "The Answer is Lead Poisoning". He also has a nice document on his website ("Lead and crime: Why this Correlation Does mean causation") that goes into his methods. He does not publish his data but there are references to it. If you wanted to repeat the process that he has gone through, however, you would need to spend a lot of time gathering data. Also, the two papers I cite here do not appear to have been peer-reviewed although some of his other work has been.
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| Reference FBI Uniform Crime Report database |
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| Reference FBI Uniform Crime Reports database |
In an earlier post about gun control, I showed that there was some correlation between the rising number of guns in the hands of law-abiding persons and the decline in the murder rate. I also admitted that the data did not show causation. I have been looking at data again for the past few days and was stumped on anything causing the decrease. I plotted murders and murder rates against the number of law enforcement employees since 1995, against the arrest rate percentages, the murder rate, etc. While there was slight correlation between the number of homicides and an increase in the number of law enforcement employees per 1000 persons, it was not great. The number of justifiable homicides by private citizens might have shown a causative link between more guns and a decrease in murder rate did not do so. Rather, the justifiable homicides seem to follow the murder rate down. Fewer murders seemed to mean fewer justifiable homicides. Here is the data.
So, in summary, none of the data supports an argument that we would have fewer homicides with fewer guns. If anything, you could make an argument for the contrary. Regardless, having more guns in the hands of law-abiding, educated people is not a problem. It can't hurt. Also, whether you agree with all of Nevin's lead poisoning arguments, certainly less lead is better and perhaps we are on the right track having banned lead in paint and in gasoline.
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